Vampiric Embrace

So there I was, in the Borean Tundra of Northrend, playing my druid. After having grinded strait our for almost a hour, I realised something

I had not healed a single time.

This was thanks to the mechanics of Improved Leader of the Pack. Let me iterate over what it does for you:

Your Leader of the Pack ability also causes affected targets to heal themselves for 4% of their total health when they critically hit with a melee or ranged attack. The healing effect cannot occur more than once every 6 sec.

So here is what I thought. Vampiric Embrace is piratically useless on fights where we do AoE, such as Thorim. But the healing would be wanted, and not at all overpowered.

We discussed changing it to a form of aura before, but what I could see would be Vampiric Embrace with the precise same mechanics and limitations as Leader of the Pack.

This would also be a welcome change to Shadow PvP. Since Leader of the Pack is bound to Cat and Bear form, I suggest ours is bound to Shadow Form, as Vampiric Embrace is bound to Shadow Form.

Here's how I would imagine the ability:

Your Vampiric Embrace ability also causes affected targets to heal themselves for 4% of their total health when they critically hit with a direct magical attack. The healing effect cannot occur more than once every 6 sec.

This would of course require us to spend points in Improved Vampiric Embrace, as druids have to do it with Improved LOTP. Notice the "Direct Magical Attack" to disable it for DoT crits.

Re: Vampiric Embrace

It would kill the ability for self-healing. I much prefer healing for 25% of all the damage I do on a single-target boss than healing for a tiny amount once every 6 seconds, and only from 2 attacks. You say it would be a welcome change for PVP. How? How often do you crit a target who has resiliance in PVP? And if it only worked off Mind Blast and Mind Flay, that would mean wanting to get any healing at all from it open you up to having your Shadow school locked out.

Improved Leader of the Pack might be alightly better for levelling alone or grinding, but I prefer a skill that is actually good for raiding at level 80 as well.

I really don't understand this suggestion at all. Basically it would make Improved VE worse in every single way except for Thorim where you are killing adds for 3 minutes. Any single-target boss fight would make this skill almost totally useless.

I shall die here. Every inch of me shall perish. Every inch, but one. An inch. It is small and it is fragile and it is the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.

Re: Vampiric Embrace

As we saw in another thread, priest levelling is not the most fun and efficient there is. I think it would be a well deserved change to the priest class from a overall perspective.

Originally Posted by Abandon

It would kill the ability for self-healing. I much prefer healing for 25% of all the damage I do on a single-target boss than healing for a tiny amount once every 6 seconds, and only from 2 attacks.

You would think the same of LOTP. I cannot balance the spell perfectly because I'm not a developer, but I think a mechanic like LOTP designed for a caster class would be well worth it.

Originally Posted by Abandon

You say it would be a welcome change for PVP. How? How often do you crit a target who has resiliance in PVP? And

Talent effects like LOTP is rolled before resilience.

Originally Posted by Abandon

I really don't understand this suggestion at all. Basically it would make Improved VE worse in every single way except for Thorim where you are killing adds for 3 minutes. Any single-target boss fight would make this skill almost totally useless.

No, if tuned properly you'll get precisely the same amount of healing that you get now, if not more.

The only difference would be that we don't have to worry about keeping a debuff up on the said target.

Re: Vampiric Embrace

Leveling shadow is great if you get spirit tap and just quest...but to DPS in dungeons n' such is so freakin horrible till later talents due to mana. I've gone 1-68 as shadow, and it hurt to level up until level 40 (shadowform) every level after that made it easier to tolerate.

Now in regards to the topic, both idea's (mana and HP) are pretty nice...thus won't be given to priests. I don't say that to be a negative nancy, but Blizzard hasn't tossed a good buff (Full talent revisions) toward any class since 3.0. Not to say it won't come up sometime in the future :, but yes, something to that effect would be very nice for the priest class as a whole.

Re: Vampiric Embrace

No, if tuned properly you'll get precisely the same amount of healing that you get now, if not more.

The only difference would be that we don't have to worry about keeping a debuff up on the said target.

Ah, I misunderstood. I thought that you meant that it would be exactly the same as Improved AoTP, which currently would make it worse, but if you were tuning it for the same health return as you currently have, then it should work. I still think it would be worse for PVP though, as typically people do not tend to stack Crit in PVP when other stats have more consistant benefit. Also, we would lose the Vampiric Embrace debuff as dispel fodder, which is quite nice now that it has no cooldown or mana cost.

I shall die here. Every inch of me shall perish. Every inch, but one. An inch. It is small and it is fragile and it is the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.

Re: Vampiric Embrace

And just to comment on this too. I think we shouldn't limit the perspective of any class to purely end-game mechanics.

Take paladin for instance, it's so balanced around game-mechanics that you got the most boring class ever to level. The majority of your damage as paladin is though auto-swing for 50 levels.

Same as the re-design of Spirit Tap, it wasn't for raiding, it was for 5man dungeons, a place where we had horrible problems keeping our mana up in TBC.

I wouldn't mind a re-design of our abilities to make levelling and grinding easier for anyone not dressed in full epics.

True, things like the mana regen nerf hurt levelling a lot more than Shadow PVE at level 80, but I would prefer that they not nerf any of our talents for raiding to make levelling take slightly less time. To be fair though, this comment was a reply to what my initial understanding of your suggestion was, which was just a spell crit copy of Improved AoTP, I was not aware you were also suggesting that it be re-tuned as well.

Might I make a suggestion? Keep VE the same as it is, a debuff that gives you 15% of your shadow damage returned as healing, and make Improved VE this:
"While in Shadowform, you and your raid members' spell critical strikes heal them for 3%/6% their total health. This effect cannot occur more than once every 6 seconds."

That way, you still have the consistant self-healing on the boss, and you can choose not to apply it if you want, and you can still use the debuff as dispel fodder, but you also get a premanent aura from taking the points in Improved VE, which would allow you to provide the raid healing aspect for casters without having to apply the debuff.
The loss of the extra 10% self healing should be made up by you also benefiting from the crit aura.

I shall die here. Every inch of me shall perish. Every inch, but one. An inch. It is small and it is fragile and it is the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.

Re: Vampiric Embrace

I like the idea, I do think VE needs some type of change to make it more useful to more than just the spriest but if you talk with most druids that will tell you that ILotP is useless in PvE so i'm not sure if this change would actually improve the existing VE.

Re: Vampiric Embrace

For things like the Tympic Tantrum, which lasts only a few seconds but provide a lot of damage, VE beats ILoTP by a lot for self healing.

I shall die here. Every inch of me shall perish. Every inch, but one. An inch. It is small and it is fragile and it is the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.

Re: Vampiric Embrace

Originally Posted by Nezoia

I would say ILotP is as useless as Vampiric Embrace then.

The difference is, they actually get a 100% uptime on it, even while doing AoE. We don't.

I agree VE needs to be changed, i'm just not convinced your proposed change actually improves what we already have. While you point out uptime will be greater, I think throughput is decreased substantially... and i find i dont need throughput during AoE.

Re: Vampiric Embrace

I think the first idea posted by Nezoia is pretty innovative and I do feel VE needs a change...

And the idea posted above is pretty decent as well... and it illustrates that we are happy with how VE affects ourselves but we're not happy with how it affects the party.

I can't say definitively whether the ILotP idea is great or not but what I can say is that most feral druids will tell you that ILotP isn't worth the talent points. So based on that, I would say (while the idea is innovative and somewhat clever) that it isn't really fixing the issue.

Nezoia is correct about uptime, but I think the lack of throughput is my issue...

Personally the problem seems to be in raid stacking so perhaps the issue should be attacked from that angle? How do you provide VE to an entire party that removes the incentive to raid stack?